Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Check Your Speaker List

The Telos Group works to offer a voice that is “genuinely pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, and pro-peace, all at the same time.” These are admirable goals, and it is the Telos Group’s self-defined mission to strengthen the capacity of American Evangelicals “to help positively transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” To this end, Telos provides many services, such as all-expenses paid pilgrimages to Israel, where they select speakers to address tour participants. Continue Reading »

The Decline and Rise
of Secular Judaism

In his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer, John de Crèvecœur asked the most famous and important question in American history: “What then is the American, this new man?” The authentic American leaves behind him “all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new . . . . Continue Reading »

Hebraism Redoubled

The blow to Christian egos may not be such a bad thing. Christians, particularly those in the West who are heirs to many centuries of political and cultural dominance, must learn to contend with shrinking influence and growing marginalization, even vilification, where they once enjoyed a high, even . . . . Continue Reading »

Sinai's Universalism

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks derives two messages from Jeremiah 29. One is that Jewish life may continue, even flourish, in the adverse soil of exile: “Build homes and dwell in them, take wives and have children.” For Jews, spiritual purpose survives the loss of power, when the prosperity and fullness . . . . Continue Reading »

Jacob and Esau

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 by John Connelly Harvard, 384 pages, $35 The Jewish religion,” said John Paul II on the occasion of his historic visit to the Chief Synagogue of Rome, “is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is . . . . Continue Reading »

The Trial of Jesus

For the last four years, I have been conducting, at New York University’s School of Law, a seminar on the trial of Jesus. The Wall Street Journal inveighed against it as educational inanity: if not exactly corrupting the youth, then at least leading them astray and squandering their tuition . . . . Continue Reading »

A King in Israel

Israel is a Jewish state but has not succeeded in defining just what that means in a national constitution. Although the 1948 Declaration of Independence called for the enactment of a constitution within months of the state’s inception, nothing has been achieved beyond a fragmentary “Basic . . . . Continue Reading »

Why Are the Jews Chosen?

One way anti-Jewish sentiment has been interpreted is simply as a quid pro quo. Gentile animosity, in this view, does to the Jews what the Jews have done, or at least would like to do, to Gentiles—because we Jews present ourselves as the chosen people. In the seventeenth century, Baruch . . . . Continue Reading »

Filter Tag Articles